A growing list of leaders are calling on Olympic organizers to come clean about tuition payments made to a relative of an International Olympic Committee member as well as any other similar expenses.
Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials spent much of Wednesday piecing together records from the privately funded $14 million bid to win the2002 Winter Games by an IOC vote but still have no specific answers.
SLOC spokesman Frank Zang said it could take a week to come up with details. "We are in the process of fully reviewing all aspects of the bid committee's assistance program," he said. "We intend to make our findings public."
The program in question was aimed at national Olympic committees in Third World nations and provided money for tuition, sports equipment and athlete development.
What's still not known is how much money was spent and who received it. Zang said the program was discontinued after Salt Lake City was awarded the Games by the IOC in June 1995.
Zang has said the program wasn't an attempt to win IOC votes.
The question of whether there were bribes associated with the bid effort arose after a September 1996 letter from Dave Johnson, a SLOC vice president, was made public.
The letter detailed a tuition payment of more than $10,000 to Sonia Essomba, a relative of the late Rene Essomba, who was an IOC member from Cameroon, Africa, when he died earlier this year at 66.
SLOC has since acknowledged there was an "outreach program" during the bid aimed at helping students chosen by national Olympic committees attend school in the United States.
"We'd heard these kinds of rumors before. I don't think we'd ever seen evidence that this was happening," Utah House Speaker-elect Marty Stephens, R-Farr West, said.
Stephens said the organizing committee needs to "come clean rather than have documents like this just trickle out and further erode the public's confidence."
The recently elected speaker, who will preside over the House during the 1999 Legislature, said lawmakers may have to take action if the organizing committee doesn't come forward.
Stephens said he also wants to see the results of a review by the state Division of Consumer Protection, the state agency that granted both the bid and organizing committees their status as charities able to raise funds.
House Minority Leader Dave Jones, D-Salt Lake, issued a call for "the full and complete disclosure of Olympic expenditures." He asked that Gov. Mike Leavitt, Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini and other legislators join him.
But Senate President Lane Beattie, R-Bountiful, said the organizing committee is in charge of the Olympics. "I keep trying to remind everyone that the Legislature is not running the Olympics," he said.
Beattie said organizers should respond to questions about the bid. "What I want to hear is, is this done in other countries? The Olympic process is so different."
The governor and the mayor are required by state law to sign off on the organizing committee's budget, which is largely privately funded.
Utah taxpayers have invested $59 million to build Olympic facilities, including a bobsled and luge track near Park City. That money is set to be repaid by the organizing committee.
The governor is waiting for SLOC to complete its review of bid finances before commenting on the scholarship program, said Leavitt's spokeswoman, Vicki Varela.
"We have incomplete information right now. Everyone will be able to understand better the nature and the extent of these activities when we have more information," she said.
Varela said the governor appreciated the assurance that there is no such ongoing scholarship program in the current budget. The only scholarship money is for Utah students.
The mayor was out of town Wednesday and not available for comment, according to her spokesman.
The issue of the tuition payments is expected to come up when the organizing committee goes before the IOC Executive Board in Lausanne, Switzerland, next month.
"Quite frankly as a member of the IOC, I don't like the public perception," said Dick Pound, an IOC vice president from Montreal, Canada. "It's potentially embarrassing to us all."
Pound said he was unfamiliar with the program and wanted to know more about it, including where the money went. The IOC has placed limits on gifts from bid committees in recent years.
"There are two sides to any bad behavior. Not only should the IOC be concerned about avoiding any conflict of interest, so should bid committees be to resorting to anything that might look like that," he said.
SLOC Chairman Bob Garff said organizers will be prepared to answer the IOC's questions. He described the program as a "humanitarian effort" and said free dental care was given to an Olympic visitor during the bid.
"Was that bribery? There've been a lot of people who've come in and we've tried to help them," Garff said. "I'm more than happy to have public scrutiny."
Garff said if anyone wrote to him and asked for an inquiry into the matter, he'd turn it over to to the independent ethics panel created by the organizing committee's board of trustees.
He'll get that request from Glenn Bailey, a spokesman for a coalition of advocates for disadvantaged Utahns who have been critical of the organizing committee in the past.
Bailey said the perks given to the IOC and others associated with the Olympics are "a gravy train that's going to continue to operate through the Games."